1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a flash memory, and more particularly, to a method for identifying a page of a block of a flash memory and determining whether the page is blank or not, and to an associated memory device thereof.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As flash memory technology progresses, many kinds of portable memory devices, such as memory cards respectively complying with SD/MMC, CF, MS, and XD standards, can be widely implemented in various applications. Therefore, the control of access to flash memories in these portable memory devices has become an important issue.
When data is copied from a first block to a second block of the flash memory, a controller of the flash memory sequentially reads the contents of all the pages in the first block and determines which page(s) is blank. Then, the controller does not copy the contents of the blank page(s) to the second block. In other words, for each page of the first block, the controller needs to read all the bits of the page, and only then can determine whether the page is blank or not. Therefore, the efficiency of accessing the flash memory is decreased. In particular, when most pages of the first block are blank pages, the efficiency of the flash memory will be seriously degraded.